THE ALGEBRAIST was published in 2004
It is a science fiction novel, but not Culture.
It is 4034 AD. Humanity has made it to the stars. Fassin Taak, a Slow Seer at the Court of the Nasqueron Dwellers, will be fortunate if he makes it to the end of the year.
The Nasqueron Dwellers inhabit a gas giant on the outskirts of the galaxy, in a system awaiting its wormhole connection to the rest of civilisation.
In the meantime, they are dismissed as decadents living in a state of highly developed barbarism, hoarding data without order, hunting their own young and fighting pointless formal wars.
Seconded to a military-religious order he’s barely heard of – part of the baroque hierarchy of the Mercatoria, the latest galactic hegemony – Fassin Taak has to travel again amongst the Dwellers. He is in search of a secret hidden for half a billion years, but with each day that passes a war draws closer – a war that threatens to overwhelm everything and everyone he’s ever known.
South Korean cover
“I set myself the goal to offer up a new non-Culture civilisation for the next science fiction novel and came up with The Algebraist. It just restored my faith in my own imagination.
“I do feel the need not to be just a one trick pony when it comes to science fiction, I do want to be able to do other stuff as well as the Culture and then sometimes I do just come up with an idea that could only work in a non-Culture universe.
“Certainly with The Algebraist that was the case. The whole thing with the choke points represented by the worm-hole network, you just couldn’t have that in the Culture. The Culture universe is much freer, the ships can kind of go anywhere they want but in The Algebraist you can’t do that, it makes it much more easy to control so you can have a big proper space empire or the equivalent thereof which you just can’t have with the technical and the entirely physical law flouting that applies to the Culture universe.”
American cover
Iain said, “It’s a dark art, trying to get exactly the right cover. [The Algebraist is my favourite] because it’s the one I designed. Well, I say “designed,” I said, ‘that’s what to do. Get a copy of a picture of Jupiter and one of its moons and just twist it ninety degrees.’ Yeah, that still is actually my favourite, but for purely egotistical reasons.”
“Usually I give characters some sort of excuse – Luceferous has a particularly manipulative and horrible dad, for example – to make them seem that bit more human, even if they are still unsympathetic (though of course that just pushes the problem a generation back), but it should be possible just to present a character like this and them be believable without too much further explanation just because we recognise a little of ourselves in them – a little that’s grossly magnified, but still... Frankly, these days, when so many people seem to have prostrated themselves before the hollow idol of Greedism, you can pretty much present the most grotesquely selfish, amoral and reactionary character without any further explanation or justification at all; people just think, ‘oh it’s a banker/oil industry CEO/yet another right-wing media billionaire...’
“I pulled out all the stops with Luceferous. He’s bad. He goes on being bad as well. I have to say his behaviour doesn’t improve morally throughout the novel. If you’re going to have a baddie, have a proper baddie.”